I don't disagree that themes are an important part of marketing a tool. The engineer in me doesn't want that to be the case, but I recognise that people like pretty things, it makes a difference.
However I'd push back a little. That Fluent UI doc site looks like every other doc site from an open source project started since ~2020 that I've seen, and this means that I have certain expectations: I expect the project to be immature, I expect the docs to be incomplete or out of date, I expect the search to be an annoying AI search that does a worse job than the basic full text search that I expect elsewhere, I expect that to get anything of substance done I'm going to have to hang out on a Discord server. When I see a ReadTheDocs site though with that default theme, I expect the project to be somewhat mature, I expect it to basically work. I expect the docs to be fairly complete.
Are these expectations fair? Not really, but that's the whole point here. Open Source projects are not immune from marketing, and when marketing, what other similar projects do will affect how people respond to your marketing. Nothing exists in isolation.
In my experience, engineers think marketing doesn't apply to them, but these impressions really do matter.
However I'd push back a little. That Fluent UI doc site looks like every other doc site from an open source project started since ~2020 that I've seen, and this means that I have certain expectations: I expect the project to be immature, I expect the docs to be incomplete or out of date, I expect the search to be an annoying AI search that does a worse job than the basic full text search that I expect elsewhere, I expect that to get anything of substance done I'm going to have to hang out on a Discord server. When I see a ReadTheDocs site though with that default theme, I expect the project to be somewhat mature, I expect it to basically work. I expect the docs to be fairly complete.
Are these expectations fair? Not really, but that's the whole point here. Open Source projects are not immune from marketing, and when marketing, what other similar projects do will affect how people respond to your marketing. Nothing exists in isolation.
In my experience, engineers think marketing doesn't apply to them, but these impressions really do matter.